Alice

Alice

Released: March 26 1988

• Director: Jan Svankmajer
• Leading Characters: Alice - Kristyna Kohoutova
• Fantasy
• Not Rated
• #795 on list

After her stuffed rabbit opens a portal inside her dresser, Alice crosses over into a world of puppets and dead animals in Czech director Jan Svankmajer's bizarre adaptation of Lewis Carroll's children's book, considered a classic of surreal cinema. Svankmajer gives the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat equally warped makeovers via stop-motion animation and stark cinematography. *taken from Netflix

Watching this was like being on an acid trip, in fact I'm pretty sure the director was on acid when he made this movie.

It's a Czech film dubbed in English and suppose to be a children's movie but is probably too scary for children. The white rabbit is a taxidermy specimen that comes to life, he's always leaking saw dust through the hole in his chest and has scary long teeth and beady glass eyes.

And it only gets worse. The flowers in the Disney version are replaced with animals that are half skeleton half stuffed with creepy glass eyes, the Caterpillar is a sock that has his eyes sewn shut when he's done talking to Alice, weird assorted foods that come to life, the list goes on and on.

Alice would narrate anything anyone said by an up close shot of her mouth with spit clinging to her teeth. There was an over fascination with drawers, it felt like there was one in every scene. Alice would pull the knob, it would fall off and then she'd have to pry to drawer open only to find a weird assortment of household objects in them. In fact the Rabbit hole happens to be a drawer that she crawls in...so weird.

One thing I did find interesting was how the director shrunk Alice. She would turn into a little doll that looked just like her, I really enjoyed those scenes.

I couldn't find any real facts on this movie so I'm not sure why it's on the list, I have to wait for my 1001 movies book to come in the mail and maybe it will tell me. I do have to say that the stop action was done really well and went smoothly, too bad it was mostly with creepy characters that made you pull a face in disgust.

I'd only recommend this movie to someone so they could see the weirdness or I knew they'd be doing some kind of hallucinogen while watching it.

I give it 1 out of 5 stars.